Murder, My Dear
by Toaster-Omlette
Summary: Someone is killing demons, and Crowley is roped into the job of finding out who - or what - exactly is doing the deed.


All disgruntled demons and ominous voices issuing from cassette tapes are the creations of a Mr. Neil Gaiman and a Sir Terry Pratchett, and I think that about does it for the disclaimer.

...

Crowley liked summer. It meant that nobody stared at him for wearing his sunglasses around the clock; in winter people would give you glances out of the corner of their eyes and wonder why you were wearing a pair of shades on a cloudy day, which wasn't so much bad as mildly annoying. Nobody likes to be stared at. And summer was hot, which was a blindingly obvious fact to anyone who bothered to step outside the air-conditioned interiors of their homes, or stick a hand out of the window of their fancy cars. The Bentley didn't have air conditioning, but that was all right because Crowley had been a snake once, and sometimes these things tend to rub off on you.

So when others were laying around and watching the telly, here he was driving around in a car whose interior was hotter than hell - it had been on fire once, but that didn't count because it was the apocalypse, and nothing that happens during those times really counts towards anything, unless you're talking world-saving, which had been undeniably successful - and listening to Rimsky-Korsakov's _Scheherezade_ (vocals by F. Mercury) at a volume that should have broken the sound system but didn't.

When Crowley was around, eleven on the amplifier became a potential reality.

As it was, the noise was enough to shake the windows and rattle Crowley's teeth in his jaw, but he didn't mind terribly. Somehow it all seemed to fit together, the heat and the noise and the broken speed limits. It was like Aziraphael and books. It just worked. Even the occasional wild jaywalker didn't spoil his mood, as it gave him something to aim at. This was a practice that Aziraphael was sure to reprimand him for, and made sure to do so every time they were in the car together, but as the angel was _not _in the car, they were fair game. Besides, the pedestrian knows about the rules of the street, or thinks it knows. It knows the risks it's taking. Although for some reason this doesn't stop them from attempting to sue the backside off of any driver who so much as beeps a horn at them - not that anyone had ever tried to sue Crowley. Not that anyone ever _wanted _to sue him, and even if they had tried then they would have found all decent lawyers in the area conveniently unavailable. Crowley felt that lawyers were easy to handle, and why shouldn't they be? They were "his" people, after all. Not all of them, as Aziraphale reminded him of when the subject was broached, but a fair chunk.

He'd tried developing a legal system once, full of as many loopholes as he could manage, and then added several subscripts stating that anyone found exploiting the loopholes would be subjected to penalties. The subscripts themselves also had loopholes, but Crowley felt that the subtleties might have been lost on a few people (i.e. everyone) since nobody ever bothered to read the fine print. He'd invented that, too, and was rather proud of it. Of course, the things that Crowley had invented and then felt proud of could have filled a book, or maybe several sets of encyclopaedias, all neatly alphabetised and stuck on a nice shelf somewhere far away from the rest of the Dewey Decimal System where no one would ever be able to find them.

So. Summer.

Crowley had seen a lot of summers, and for the most part found them nearly identical to all other parts of the year except for the temperature and the amount of tourists. Tourists were one of those things that should have been easy to ignore but weren't, like trying to fall asleep when you know that the door to your bedroom is still open a crack when it ought to be completely shut. They were blindingly obvious when you saw them on the streets, shuffling about with their noses stuck in London A-Z and holding large and very rumpled maps of the Underground. They were always asking about the whereabouts of places that were nice to look at maybe once and then forgotten about because hang it all, there were chips to be eaten, and wandering in an out of shops that sold merchandise no sane man would want to be caught buying. Tourism did something to the brain that made you think that buying a snowglobe with a plastic model of Buckingham Palace and a large quantity of sparkles inside of it for fifteen quid was a sensible decision. Very nice for the industry, not so much for the tourists, but they didn't notice because making their purchase they were too busy trying to find the next big thing to complain about the pricing.

There had been tourists inside Aziraphale's bookshop once, and although they had struck Crowley as being a bit more sensible than your typical crop, the young couple had quickly found themselves out in the street again. People tended to make themselves scarce when Aziraphale began glowering at them from behind the counter, which tradition dictated should have had a cash register, a bell, and a rack of nice shiny pamphlets sitting on it; it didn't because the angel felt that having a monetary device in plain sight encouraged the purchasing of his precious pieces of literature, didn't need a bell because of his uncanny ability to sense whenever someone might require a helping hand in being ushered out the door, and didn't care much for pamphlets unless they were for particularly good restaurants. Then again, good restaurants usually didn't _need _pamphlets, since if they were good then everyone already knew of their existence.

Crowley spotted a couple standing on the sidewalk while their children fooled around in the gutter playing silly buggers. He revved the engine as he passed and listened with a satisfied smirk as the two boys shrieked and tumbled backwards, no doubt scuffing their shoes and gaining a couple of scraped elbows and a lecture about the dangers of playing in the streets. It was a nice bit of soul-tarnishing. Nothing impressive, but relatively decent, if there was anything about soul-tarnishing that could be considered "decent." One of the assumptions people sometimes made about Crowley was that he was nice. Crowley wasn't nice. He was amiable enough when the situation called for it or when he was feeling genuinely pleased with something, but demons weren't allowed to be nice. Nice was for human beings who spent their time looking after orphaned children and donating to charities, although that was what you got when you reached the very far end of the spectrum, and thankfully it didn't happen very often, much to Aziraphale's chagrin.

It could be considered ironic that the one person that Crowley actually made an effort to be nice to was Aziraphale, when by rights they should have been at each others throats, what with the whole war- between-heaven-and-hell thing. The whole scenario seemed quite ridiculous when you thought about it very hard, but so was the idea of having a whole bunch of angels and demons wandering about the city and going out to lunch like the best of friends. It just didn't work, and so you went with what you got, and in this case what you got was a whole lot of hoopla about souls and rivalry with Crowley and Aziraphale being secretly chummy in the middle of it all.

Well, maybe not so secretly, now that the apocalypse had been averted and both great powers became a little more aware of the situation on Earth, but Crowley chose to remain pleasantly optimistic with the knowledge that said great powers were probably too busy focusing on the failure of an anti-Christ, and, less optimistically, trying to go about making a new one. But that wasn't likely to be the sort of thing that happened for a good long while, even if it _was _supposed to be ineffable and all that. Even considering the possibility, it wasn't one of those things that you talked about. It was like being at a dinner party and trying to bring up your recent colonoscopy in the middle of a conversation about the lovely new dinnerware that the hostess had just purchased for the occasion. Surgery and cocktails didn't mix. They still don't, unless you happen to be celebrating someone's recovery from one, but even then the conversation so often turns to other, more savoury topics.

The radio crackled and Freddie Mercury's dulcet tones turned into a grating hellfire of a voice that did not sound as though it had ever been happy a day in its life, and wasn't about to start now.

_CROWLEY, _said the voice.

"Um," said Crowley. Not one of his better responses to mystical messages from the depths of hell, he decided. "Um," he added again for good measure. "What can I do for you today, lord?"

_WE ARE NOT HAPPY, CROWLEY._

_Yes, tell me something I don't already know, _thought Crowley. "Um, yes, okay. Why not?" It was probably going to end up being some trivial and overblown thing that Below had inspected a bit too closely and decided to make a big song and dance about. It usually was, with these sorts of things. That, or someone had decided to complain about how he wasn't working as hard as the rest of him, he and his house-plants and his Bentley and his frequent visits to a little bookshop that nobody paid much mind to unless they were really looking for it.

_SOMEONE IS KILLING DEMONS. _

Not so much song and dance, then. "Um," replied Crowley for a third time. He was not feeling particularly vocal at the moment. "Sorry, did you just say someone is killing demons?"

_YES, WE DID. IT IS A PROSPECT THAT DISTURBS US DEEPLY, AND WE DO NOT DEVELOP THIS MINDSET VERY OFTEN. _

"But how are they being killed? Who's doing the killing? And how do they know that you, sorry, we, exist?" Unless it was another demon doing the killing, which was something that Crowley would have condoned if he hadn't been guilty of it himself.

_THAT IS WHY WE HAVE DECIDED TO ASSIGN YOU THE DUTY OF INVESTIGATION. YOU HAVE ALREADY MANAGED TO DISAPPOINT US ONCE BEFORE, CROWLEY, DO NOT THINK WE HAVE FORGOTTEN. MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT DO SO AGAIN. _

"Yes, well, sorry about that, it was a bit of a fiasco, won't happen again, what exactly am I supposed to do with the guilty party when I find them?"

_REMOVE THE THREAT._

"Right, that was a stupid question. Remove the threat. Got it." The voice gave a final dignified growl and petered out into silence, having interrupted the tape only a minute before its end. The only sounds in the car were Crowley's ragged breathing and the whir of the cassette player as it began to flip the tape over. Suddenly a horn blared obnoxiously from behind, and Crowley realised that he had unwittingly pressed on the brakes in the middle of the road and that a convoy of disgruntled drivers was beginning to form behind him. He hissed between his teeth and lifted his foot from the pedal, rolling forwards and around the corner as the rest of the cars rumbled by. He raised his hand and outlined a sigil in the air, pointing his fingers in the general direction of the car that had beeped its horn at him, and listened with some satisfaction as the vehicle's alarm began blaring at full volume. It was perhaps a petty thing to do, but he was beginning to feel stressed and needed to let out the energy _somehow._

Also, Crowley did not like to be beeped at.

He drove along down a side road and pulled up to the curb, ignoring the red paint glistening on the cement. "Demons being killed," he said. "Remove the threat," as though restating what he had been told would make the situation any more clearer. The powers that be were, in this case, choosing to be rather vague about things and to leave out certain details like how long ago the killings had started and how exactly Crowley was supposed to go about finding the one responsible. He assumed the culprit must be human, since Below usually kept tabs on the ones who worked for them, and he didn't think that angels were really in for the whole go-out-and-righteously-slay-the-enemy sort of thing, unless that was a part of the ineffable plan that was only just coming into play. This did not make him feel any better, since looking for the human in question would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, although any sensible person, Crowley thought, would just set the haystack on fire. That was the problem with metaphors. They always forgot about the easy way of doing things. However, since London could not be set on fire - well, it _could, _but Crowley was sure that it wasn't the sort of thing that won you any medals, and that it wouldn't make his job any easier - he was going to have to do this the hard way.

That is to say, he was first going to have to figure out exactly what the hard way _was_, and then do whatever the way dictated. He suspected that it was going to be somewhat boring, at least until things began to heat up. Figuratively, of course. No fires involved, haystack-related or otherwise.

Crowley decided to do what he always did when there was something he couldn't quite wrap his mind around: go for a drive and break a few more speed laws and mull over the whole thing. And then, when he finally came to the inevitable conclusion that nothing about anything made any sense whatsoever, he would go and consult Aziraphale. It was the inevitable conclusion, really, but Crowley was a demon. He still had _some _pride.

He revved the engine several more times and meandered off down the road, leaving the cassette player off this time, just in case.


End file.
